“He held up a big, blow-up poster-size of [the] Heineken ad,” recalled Julie Kinch, chief legal officer for Heineken USA, Inc., who was speaking to a crowd of top in-house attorneys on Tuesday at an Argyle Executive Forum event, held at the Princeton Club in Manhattan. “The optics were not great,” she said. The company also wound up facing nine class action suits revolving around the issue of underage drinking around the same time.
The issue at hand, according to Kinch, was reputational risk management. Not just the domain of public relations and marketing, shoring up a company or brand’s reputation should involve the law department, too, she says. From undesirable media attention to government investigations, demands for new regulations and laws, and even litigation: “Legal risk, to me, is a byproduct of reputational risk,” Kinch said. “Here’s an opportunity to talk about how lawyers can get it right.”
